


Honedge

by DeltaHexagon



Category: Pokemon
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-17
Updated: 2013-12-17
Packaged: 2018-01-04 23:38:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1087024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeltaHexagon/pseuds/DeltaHexagon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You were human, once. Though as hard as you try, you can't remember anything other than an aching loneliness and the dull scrape of steel on stone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Honedge

You remember it all so clearly. The conflict. The pain. The screams and cries of others just like you, falling in combat. And, for a second, you remember that you fell in combat, too, and for longer than you can possibly imagine you recall nothing but an aching darkness that spanned to the edges of reality and back. 

But that’s just a faraway dream, now. Fleeting visions that play fitfully in the background. You stir in your slumber for the first time in what feels to be years and slowly regain awareness. Your surroundings seem… wrong, but you can’t seem to place why. You don’t recognize where you are and squeeze your eyes shut again, willing yourself to fall back into the sweet unreality of your painfully familiar dreams. 

The moment you try your entire being is overcome with the terrible sensation of burning, of aching bones and pounding headaches. It feels like your life-force is being siphoned away, and the sheer intensity of it is enough to jerk you out of your sleep and back into the world of the living. 

The smell of damp earth and grass is the first thing you notice, and you suddenly realize why everything seems so wrong. You’re in a wet, cold cave, where not even the daylight bothers to shine, and when you listen you can hear the soft insistent _plop_ of rain dripping down from the rocks above. There’s birdsong outside, and you temporarily leave your confusion behind as a rapturous feeling of joy washes over you. You want to go out there, out from the cold confines of this cave. You want to be where the life is. You want to live once more. 

But… You can’t. And you try and try again, but you can’t seem to will yourself to move. You scream inside your mind, overcome with terror, as you slowly begin to understand you’re not who you used to be anymore. And this time, when you finally manage to shift in your place upon the ground, the harsh screech of steel on stone greets your ears rather than the soft shuffle of clothed limbs. 

Your mind is on fire with a million unanswered questions and you begin to panic, casting fevered eyes around your prison. 

You try to fall back on those distant dreams for comfort but they fled long ago and left behind bittersweet sadness in their stead, the intensity of which brings you close to tears. Once more you attempt a futile endeavour and try to move, and once again the rasp of steel echoes throughout your cave, intermingling only briefly with the patient drip of rain. This time though, and you’re not exactly sure how, you feel yourself lift nimbly into the air, and without warning you have a much wider view of your surroundings. 

And what do you see first? Sprouting with flowers and covered with a fine layer of dust, your roving eyes land upon the bleached white remains of what at one point in time had been you. Clutched feebly in one of its skeletal hands is the gleaming bronze hue of a scabbard, and tenderly you reach forward to touch it with the brilliant blue tassel that now constitutes your hand. 

You want to cry, but you can’t. So instead you gently lay yourself down, mindful of your blade, and lay your tasseled hand across the skeleton’s chest, stirring up a cloud of ancient dust in the process. A soft breeze blows in and trickles through the bones and the grass, and you let your eye close, keeping your scabbard in sight for as long as you can. 

You want to dream again, so you do. You dream of the past, of memories you hold dearly to yourself. Perhaps in the morning you’ll do something, go somewhere. Maybe you’ll even leave the cavern in search of something resembling a life, again. But for the time being, you’re tired, and you can’t bring yourself to leave the last, crumbling vestiges of your humanity. 

You try to tell yourself it’ll be alright, but you’re scared. You died as a man and you awoke once more as a ghost, and only now do you realize there’s much more truth to all those ancient legends than you gave credit to. 

But for now, you once again find solace in your dreams, and you sleep. 

And you dream that perhaps you were a human, and at some point you had a family. But mostly you dream silent, unheard things you won’t remember. And the silence of the cave is the only thing that listens.


End file.
